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Conversation
In the cycle of life and death, death is grossly misunderstood. Dying has been marketed as the ultimate defeat to living – it’s a product of disaster, discomfort and disease. We often shroud it in euphemisms to avoid offending life. It is an unwanted crack in the glass of a mass individualist delusion that a valid measure of the quality of a life is how well it eludes death. In a dominant culture obsessed with vilifying death, we’ve lost our ability to acknowledge its inextricable relationship to life itself. Denying death’s inevitability leaves a gaping hole in the understanding of the intimate section of life on the precipice of death – in denying death, we deny life itself. What would it look like if we were to recognize and actively tend to what is dying before us with the same loving care that we give to what is living?
This October lunar cycle invites us to explore the ways that we can – and must – welcome death back into the discourse. We will gather for the first session to discuss what is means to actively hospice as a verb, a beautiful and seamless addition to the lexicon thanks to Vanessa Machado de Oliveira's inspiring work Hospicing Modernity. As we stand on the precipice of a long-denied cultural death of the modern, dominant culture of Western patriarchal capitalism, we will hold space for the unsettling acceptance of what must be relinquished as necessary work for showing up fully to the birth of what is to come. Over the course of this cycle we will come together to hospice, grieve, metabolize, and attend together, bearing witness to and welcoming the infinite cycle of death and life. Join the first session to offer your awareness to that which is dying around and within us and develop your own stamina for letting go of attachments to the futurity built from what we’ve known.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering: